AN ANALYSIS OF SUBTITLING STRATEGIES AND TRANSLATION ACCURACY OF TABOO LANGUAGE IN HELL’S KITCHEN SEASON 24

The study aims to identify the types of taboo language based on Battistella's (2005) framework, analyze the subtitling strategies based on Gottlieb's (1992) theory, and evaluate the translation accuracy using Nababan et al.'s (2012) Translation Quality Assessment (TQA) from English into Indonesian in the Netflix series Hell's Kitchen Season 24 (Episodes 2–4). A descriptive qualitative method was employed through content analysis and a Focus Group Discussion (FGD). A total of 139 data items containing taboo language were identified. Obscenity emerged as the most dominant type with 98 data items (70.50%), followed by vulgarity with 28 data items (20.14%), profanity with 12 data items (8.63%), and epithets with only 1 data item (0.72%). Of Gottlieb's ten subtitling strategies, the translator applied only three: paraphrase was the most frequently used, with 68 instances (48.92%), followed by deletion, with 60 instances (43.17%), and transfer, with 11 instances (7.91%). The average translation accuracy score was 1.98, placing it in the less accurate category. The majority of the data fell into the less accurate category with
114 instances (82.01%), followed by not accurate with 14 instances (10.7%), and accurate with 11 instances (7.91%). The dominance of paraphrase and deletion strategies, together with the overall less accurate score, indicates that while the basic meaning of the source text was generally maintained, the emotional intensity and offensive nuances of the taboo language were often reduced in translation. The chosen subtitling strategies prioritized cultural acceptability over preserving the emotional intensity of the source text. Consequently, the characterizations and authentic atmosphere that define this reality television program were weakened in the target language.